Hudson’s sauces
The sauce business began very organically and insignificantly and was initiated because quite often we had requests from our restaurant patrons to take a taste of Hudson’s home with them on their way out the door. To satisfy these requests we began to jar-up a few of our most popular tastes and from that innocent little action, the sauce business became a snowball rolling downhill, gaining speed and size.
Off I went to the nearest arts and craft store to procure some glass jars to fill with our sauces which we then labeled with labels generated on my office computer. Being naïve to the particulars of packaging product for sale, Jay Moore and I categorized the sauces as “to-go” food; easy breezy and all was well or so we thought, until the Health Department spotted our “to-go” rack of yumminess in the lobby. Our motto was to ask for forgiveness instead of permission.
On any given day the Health Department can shut down a restaurant for any variety of reasons and that is why they are so greatly feared. The Health Department inspectors are primarily interested in the cleanliness of the kitchen where the food is prepared and the walk-in coolers where the food is held and sometimes won’t even include the dining room in their inspection.
When we first installed the sauce display rack in the lobby, the health squad didn’t spot it on the following visit, but on their next inspection they did. The Health Inspector ventured into the front of the house on his way to inspect our smoke house and the bathrooms to make sure they were up to code and on his way he had to walk right past the rack that held the “to-go” products.
They grinned and smirked at our innocence as we explained it was “to-go” food and we certainly had done no wrong. The inspector told us that bottling these products was illegal and dangerous and then explained that bottling products was a different branch of the Health Department and we could expect to hear from the State Health Department soon. The very next day we had that visit from the State Health Department and they supervised as we opened and poured all of our “to-go” products into the trash can. They then sat down with us and told us the path we needed to take to be legit sauce purveyors.
I spent three days at A&M in College Station learning how to become a legal bottler of food. There are a series of requirements that the sauce needs to meet before it is ready to be bottled and labeled. I learned things like, most bacteria grow best around neutral pH values of 6.5-7.0, so obviously you have to have pH level below 6.5 and then the sauce needs to be at 180 degrees or hotter at the time of bottling. The sauce heat kills the bacteria and as it cools in the bottle it contracts and sucks the plastic liner and the lid in to create an airtight seal. There was a new bottle cap system on the market that was proven to be safer, it has a soft pliable yet strong plastic ring in the cap and it safely seals the bottle. As your product cools you will know the jars are safely sealing as you hear the pop of the lids, just like Grandma’s mason jars.
With the knowledge of right way versus wrong way, bottling sauces is a simple task and takes nominal money, enter the “Mom & Pop” parade of salsa production.
The hardest part of my A&M schooling was separating the information that applied to our specific sauce production because there were folks from Frito-Lay, Coca Cola Food Division, etc. in the same class speaking a language I was not familiar with. They asked a lot of questions about a retort, I had no idea what a retort was. Before the new procedure you had to put the jars in a retort. In an attempt not to look stupid I held my tongue until lunch and found the campus book store and a dictionary. I looked up RETORT and found out it was a big oven that operates at an optimum temperature range of 1,400 to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Campbell Soup would load a railroad car completely full with cans of tomato soup and drive it in the retort. It would kill the bacteria and seal the soup, it was now shelf stable. I returned to class equipped with retort knowledge. Aww knowledge.
This “book learning” part was just the beginning, now it was “do it” time. In my quest to gain further knowledge I called an old friend who knew Spike Robinson who knew Dan Jardine. Dan was like us in that he started his salsa bottling with a lot of elbow grease and a small budget. I was introduced to Spike and he very kindly took us to meet Dan. He had done well with his sauce business and now his multimillion-dollar new bottling plant was almost complete. He shared his pricing strategy which was simple, if the total cost including product, label, labor, jar and lid was $3.00 his retail price was $9.00 and his wholesale price, i.e. grocery stores was $6.00. Most folks start with one or two products but ignorance is bliss and our startup were eleven different products. Our menu of bottled sauces was Tomatillo White Chocolate, Mango Jalapeño,
Guava Sour Cherry, Herb Vinegar, Bourbon Vanilla Praline, Mexican Marigold Mustard, Orange Ginger BBQ, Chipotle BBQ, Madagascar Peppercorn, Brandy Apple Cider, and Strawberry Raspberry.
With ingredients in the back of our cars, Jay and I headed to Dan’s bottling facility. We had to adjust our recipes to get the pH level down, acids lower the pH, some recipes we added more vinegar others we added more citrus juice. However, the recipes that we started with were very close so with a little tweak here and a little splash there, the recipes were a success.
We thought the hard part was done, wrong, like most new products, advertising is the hard part. At the onset we signed on with Dan to package and market our sauces but we soon left Jardine’s umbrella and went out on our own when we realized Dan was doing very little promotion and was charging us an inflated price for his services. After some checking around I found we could rent an approved bottling kitchen and do the entire production ourselves a whole lot cheaper than Jardine’s. No regrets as the education that Dan gave us during our early beginnings was very valuable.
Hudson’s already had a well-established name and the local stores were promoting local chefs so it was easy to get our sauces onto the shelves in local Austin stores. To get on the shelves in other city’s we had to increase our sales numbers to prove to them it was a profitable and sought-after product. After our initial surge in the local market, we had to keep the consumers excited and interested in our sauces to increase our sales. To do that I put on my chef’s coat and did grocery store tastings. Well that got old fast. What I did realize is that my in-store tasting was dual purposed, advertising the restaurant while hawking the sauces. When our first cookbook was published, I triple marketed, the cookbook promoted the sauce line and the restaurant, and the sauce line promoted the cookbook and the restaurant, and the restaurant promoted the sauces and the cookbook, something for everybody, win, win, win! I soon realized there were not enough hours in my day to promote all these revenue streams that I had created and I had to hire people to promote. No one wanted to be the grocery store taster, but it was a great part time job for the college kids in our life, my son did it while at UT and about the time he graduated, Sara’s daughter started at UT and took the tasting torch for some spending moolah.
We were a little ahead of our time with the sauces and people were uncertain of what to use the sauces on and were used to cooking with sauces, but ours were finishing sauces. You would grill, bake or sauté your main course and then top your entrée with one of our sauces, just like your favorite restaurant. It was an educational process that was not easily explained. Our sauce business was tasty and profitable, but didn’t spread like wildfire, you need a person with the passion to be the sauce boss.
During production you have to number each bottle, record the production date, how many bottles per batch, pH level, temperature at bottling time and you document all of this and have these available for the inspector. When I lost interest the information charts didn’t get completed and the health department recalled all of our products when they discovered our shortcomings. We had already had a good offer to sell the restaurant and the buyers were not interested in the sauces so I let it die.
Below you will find the recipe for Bourbon Vanilla Praline Sauce and our recipe for Bourbon Vanilla Sweet Potatoes. This recipe was reprinted in the local newspaper for years as the favorite sweet potato recipe at Thanksgiving. During the holidays we had to highly increase production of this sauce to keep up with the demand. The name may appear to be misnamed as there is no bourbon in the sauce rather the vanilla in the sauce was grown on the Bourbon Island. It does have reduced rum and brandy in it. Your recipe uses rum extract. When we first produced the sauce, we used store bought rum and would reduce it ourselves. It was safer to use extract. I was in the restaurant driveway reducing 2 gallons of rum. I had a 20-gallon stock pot set atop a butane fired turkey fryer with 2 gallons of bubbly rum in the bottom. When I lit it a 30-foot blue flame appeared. It was 5:00am and the sun had not risen. It looked like a rocket ship going the wrong way. The county sheriff happened to be driving by. He slammed on his brakes and came back to say “what the hell are you doing?”. I replied “just reducing rum for a big recipe”. He shook his head and drove away. I wonder what he was thinking. I wanted to say “I’m a mad scientist testing rocket fuel”.
Be careful when reducing alcohol and enjoy the sweet potato recipe.
Bourbon Vanilla Praline Sauce
1-quart light corn syrup
1/3 cup vanilla (preferably bourbon vanilla)
2 tablespoons rum extract
2 tablespoons cinnamon
1 tablespoon nutmeg
2-pounds dark brown sugar
1/3 cup brandy
2-pounds butter
1 cup pecan pieces
2 tablespoons sea salt
Method
Mix all ingredients in a saucepan and bring to simmer for 8 minutes.
Serve warm atop cheesecake or ice cream. Use your imagination.
You will have extra sauce.
It will hold for months in your refrigerator.
Bourbon Vanilla Praline Sweet Potatoes
Ingredients
6 large sweet potatoes (boiled in water until tender to knife—cool and peel
1 ½ cups graham cracker crumbs
2 tablespoons butter
1 ½ cups pecan pieces
2 cups Bourbon Vanilla Praline Sauce
Method
Slice and shingle sweet potatoes in a casserole dish.
Add the butter.
Pour on BVP sauce.
Cover with pecans and graham crackers crumbs.
Bake at 350 for 35 minutes.